Hubris Quotes

We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal. ~ David Gergen

If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it - too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul - the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of hubris the overfed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush into the unrighteousness that hubris always breeds. ~ Plato

Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess. ~ Russell D. Moore

There is no "only one" Vietnam experience - there are as many as there are those who went to Vietnam - but this is mine - the combat, the excitement, the discomfort, the fear, the accomplishments, the hubris, the politics, the challenges, and the sex. This is 1968 - MY Vietnam experience. ~ Joseph E Abodeely

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control. ~ David Foster Wallace

When we don't put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions. ~ Zeena Schreck

What is your favorite day of the year? The summer solstice. June twenty-first. The longest day of the year. It was a cute answer. But on cooler reflection, it struck me that when you're asked your favorite day of the year, there's a certain hubris in giving any day in June as your answer. It suggests that the particulars of your life are so terrific, and your command over your station so secure, that all you could possibly hope for is additional daylight in which to celebrate your lot. ~ Amor Towles

A puppet of manipulative politicians has always his own self-destructive hubris. ~ Angelica Hopes, The F. Trilogy ~ Angelica Hopes

The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just. ~ Plato

Do you use 'True Will' as an excuse to do nothing?
Have you declared yourself enlightened?
Damn your weak philosophies; a pox and a pestilence your despicable sloth and arrogance. ~ Peter J. Carroll

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that's left is the building.
[Ozymandias syndrome, anyone? Ed.] ~ James S.A. Corey

The real question is why you still believe in that invisible god when a true one stands before you? ~ Ben Willoughby

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60). ~ Joseph Campbell

Most humans turn away from God simply for the privilege of deluding themselves into thinking they are the masters of their own destiny. ~ Dennis Garvin

And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.
~ Aeschylus

The ordinary is not good enough for us; our hubris wants something grandiose. But the ordinary done in obedience to Christ is beautiful, inspired, and oftentimes heroic. ~ Edward T. Welch

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn. ~ Moby

Because hubris is not only a sin, it's a fun game to play at parties ~ Mira Grant

But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.
Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival. ~ Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau. ~ Michael Ignatieff

The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos. ~ Butler Shaffer

In my opinion, to assume a persons' motivations, life experiences or self identity may, at best, demonstrate one's ignorance and, at worst, display one's hubris. ~ Tristan A. Star

The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find that they know all, meet in that same ignorance whence they started. It is a clever ignorance, which knows itself. Those among them who, having emerged from the first ignorance, have been unable to achieve the other & have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, pose as experts. The latter do not disturb people, are no more mistaken in their judgments on everything than others. The masses, the skilled, make up the retinue of a nation. The others, who respect it, are equally respected by it. ~ Comte De Lautreamont

Such hubris could only come from a man's mouth. ~ Janet Morris

The first lesson every child of Athena learned: Mom was the best at everything, and you should never, ever suggest otherwise. ~ Rick Riordan

There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we've seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander. ~ Warren Buffett

This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm. He ~ Noah Hawley

The violent but narrow passions that pass under the name of patriotism are not the noblest forms of human and social emotions. The world, or the people who, unfortunately, have most to say in governing the world, believe no such thing, and will not believe it when the representatives of States meet again to decide how to fill up the graves which they helped dig in Europe. ~ Leonard Woolf

The serene confidence with which Western journalists and liberal academics prescribe solutions to our [Singapore's] problems is a source of constant wonder to us. ~ Goh Keng Swee

I want you," he muttered. "Get rid of him and take me. The only risk is losing someone you don't have anyway. He's not what you need, Ella. I am"
"Unbelievable," I said in disgust.
"What's unbelievable?"
"Your ego. It's surrounded by its own cloud of antimatter. You're a black hole of ... of hubris! ~ Lisa Kleypas

Politicians in their hubris who believe they can ignore debt or wish it away are sorely disappointed - as we see now with the plummeting approval ratings of both the administration and Congress. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens
a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree
the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence
antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. ~ Michael Pollan

The exegetical foundations would appear to be weak, and one shouldn't build huge theological edifices, no matter how splendid or consistent, on weak foundations. ~ Ben Witherington III

There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time. ~ Walter Scott

Without any intended hubris, I've lead a pretty exciting life. What I've tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story. ~ Oliver North

The campaign in Iraq illustrates the continuing progress of military technology and tactics, but if there is a single overriding lesson it must be this: American military power, especially when buttressed by Britain's, is virtually unchallengeable today. Take us on? Don't try! And that's not hubris, it's just plain fact. ~ Wesley Clark

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. ~ Michael Pollan

Hubris, arrogance, is just one step ahead of loss of integrity, because if you think you're better than other people, you know more, then you're going to think, as many leaders have, that the rules don't apply to them - so they lose their integrity. ~ Charles Koch

The top line is that hubris is a disease that comes from success. ~ Peter Beinart

And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its own unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms. ~ Richard Tarnas

His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. He cannot free them, not in the practical sense. He's tried before and failed. He can, however, make their suffering serve a cause greater than one city's hubris, and one empire's fear. ~ N.K. Jemisin

Where I grew up - we started out in Oklahoma and then moved to Missouri - it was considered hubris to talk about yourself. And the downside of that was that ideas rarely got exchanged, or true feelings. ~ Brad Pitt

Scientists in general tend to have what I would call a bit of hubris that the public do not necessarily understand. So scientists some times make claims that are misunderstood by the public. ~ George Coyne

I'd sooner worship a lemon than any of the gods men have created. ~ Marty Rubin

Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy he'd had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time's cadences - jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant - entered his body via several openings, cold the way only damp cold is cold (the phrase he'd once had the gall to imagine he understood was the phrase "chilled to the bone"), shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints' glassy crunch with every slightest shift of his hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, very cold and slow; and the pain of his breath against his teeth. ~ David Foster Wallace

I think about my daughter now, and what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful. The doctor said she didn't feel a thing, went straight into a coma. Then, somewhere in that blackness, she slipped off into another, deeper kind. Isn't that a beautiful way to go out, painlessly as a happy child?
Trouble with dying later is you've already grown up. The damage is done. It's too late. You got kids? I think of the hubris it must take, to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat; a force of life into this thresher. As to my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father. ~ Rust Cohle True Detective

Mis-define the law of brotherly love by giving men a claim on their neighbors and you have destroyed freedom, justified despotism, and assumed that there can be a master mind, in an ordinary human being, as the mind of God. ~ Frederick Nymeyer

What happened is that in the middle of my life I went away and in my own sense of hubris, pride, cynicism, thought, I am an autonomous being in the world, I can control things, I am God.' But my experiment at being God failed! And they do have a great saying in AA: 'Get down off the cross, we need the wood!' And the important thing is to realise you are not the centre of the universe, you are not God. ~ John Waters

In ancient mythology," Langdon offered, "a hero in denial is the ultimate manifestation of hubris and pride. No man is more prideful than he who believes himself immune to the dangers of the world. ~ Dan Brown

The thing is," Teddy said, "the disease itself feels like a judgment. We've all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it's a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that's almost worse, it's like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn't, it's a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn't care, it's a judgment on how much you hate yourself. Isn't that why the world loves Ryan White so much? How could God have it out for some poor kid with a blood disorder? But then people are still being terrible. They're judging him for just being sick, not even for the way he got it. ~ Rebecca Makkai

They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New York, because they'd rather stay home (right now, the woman in the fringed pashmina shawl, the one walking arm-in-arm with Cowboy Boots, explodes in laughter, a great smacking hoot of a laugh, a three-martinis laugh, audible for a block or so), while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it's almost impossible to maintain a sense of hubris when you live here, you're too constantly confronted by the rampant otherness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you've got a house and a lawn and an Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you'll get a second's more existence because the bomb won't be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you're not anybody's main target, you've removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal, ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor's son will break in and steal a ~ Michael Cunningham

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery. ~ Will Leitch

I think people are used to people in show business having a lot of hubris. I think I have a normal amount of self-loathing but because I'm in show business it's considered self-deprecation. In normal life I would just be considered your average neurotic. ~ Jon Stewart

The silent killer of all great men and women of achievement - particularly men, I don't know why, maybe it's the testosterone - I think it's narcissism. Even more than hubris. And for women, too. Narcissism is the killer. ~ James Woods

I don't think it's hubris for me to say I'm a Trek fan. So, I don't treat Trek fans as somebody who's separate than I am. The only thing that separates them is, I'm one of the people responsible for the story in this movie and they're not. But we're all Trek fans. I can hang. ~ Damon Lindelof

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole? ~ Michel De Montaigne

I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without. ~ Mary Norris

Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew. ~ Bruce Crown

Boastfulness and excessive pride do not equate at all with humility and honesty, credibility and integrity. ~ Angelica Hopes, The F. Trilogy ~ Angelica Hopes

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,
The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;
Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,
And Poets once had promis'd they should last. ~ Alexander Pope

hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, "can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale." The syndrome, he continues, "is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader. ~ John M. Coates

I really didn't think this was going to happen. I thought bad things only happened to people with hubris. They don't happen to people like me, people that know how fragile life is, people that respect the authority of a higher power. But it has. It has happened to me. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn. ~ Alexander Chee

It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I'm kind of concerned about 'Ego & Hubris' because I'm thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they'll wonder, 'Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?' ~ Harvey Pekar

With competition there is always ego and hubris ... competition gets in the way of work. ~ Patrick Dempsey

And behind the good doctor, his Wall of Hubris: I counted seven framed degrees, hung with care and pride and more than a little jackassedness. Oh-ho, you don't believe I'm important, eh? Well then, how do you explain these?!?!?! ~ David Arnold

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked. ~ Matthew Scully

The worst kind of arrogance is arrogance from ignorance. ~ Jim Rohn

My fatal flaw is hubris.
The brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?
No, seaweed brain. That's hummus. Hubris is worse.
What could be worse than hummus? ~ Rick Riordan

There were many stories of girls - brave girls, foolish girls, reckless girls, pretty girls - who went into the woods searching for fortune or adventure, only to encounter a monster. Whether man or beast, the monster served as an allegory for all the things that could befall a girl who strayed from the path. If she were valorous and her heart was pure, the stories said, she could rise above being brought low by hubris.

But the stories never talked about the other girls - the ones who never came out of the woods and found themselves an unwilling bride to the venal darkness within those trees. The girls whose virtue was not quite enough to resist the seasoned allure of the wicked villain and who, as a result, found that men, like beasts, could devour the unwary, and that it could feel so good to be consumed. ~ Nenia Campbell

telling him how people had thought the same thing long before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that when they went, they wouldn't go alone. Their hope was that no one would have the good fortune to come after and live a happy life without them. Thoughts ~ Hugh Howey

The Modern Self must confront the shadow of hubris. ~ Richard Tarnas

Men who thought of themselves as gods fell the farthest, and the hardest. ~ Nenia Campbell

I've heard stories about authors filled with this kind of Lotto-winner hubris. I'm a Dutch boy from the Midwest. We don't have hubris. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry ... Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris. ~ Terence McKenna

Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view. ~ James Thurber

Ultimate hubris is trashing our little blue canoe.
Fundamental insecurity is turning a blind eye."
~ L. G. Cullens ~ L.G. Cullens

(As Plato There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

Adventure becomes hubris when it blinds you to the suffering of the human beings next to you. ~ Mark Jenkins

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist. ~ Larry Wall

He put an arm around me and helped me across the lawn into the passenger's seat. The inside was red and white as a strawberry sundae, with black analog gauges. It was inefficient and sprawling; it screamed of hubris and excess and obsolescence; it was America on wheels. ~ Mishell Baker

If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it. narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19 ~ Charles Yu

Hillary's was a sterile, math-driven campaign in an angry, populist cycle – a perfect case of professional-class hubris that will one day take its place alongside the expert-planned, systems-analyzed war in Vietnam as a parable of technocratic folly. ~ Donna Brazile

MSN became a quagmire, partly because of Microsoft's hubris. ~ Donald Clark

As with many tragedies, our story opens in a moment of triumph. ~ Dan Jones

Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species ~ Garrett Hardin

Some upstarts always try to get closer to the source of creation by ascending to the source's level. The story of Icarus is of course a parable about the folly of such an effort. Get too close to the sun and your hubris will get you burned. Yet in the eyes of twenty-first-century capitalist culture, which worships at the twin altars of the individual and technology, Icarus had initiative. And his melted wings do not represent some deep character flaw; he just needed better beta testers. ~ Marcus Wohlsen

Unbelievable," I said in disgust.
"What's unbelievable?"
"Your ego. It's surrounded by its own cloud of antimatter. You're a black hole of ... of hubris!"
Jack stared at me through the shadows, and then he averted his face, and I thought I saw the white flash of a grin.
"Are you amused?" I demanded. "What the hell is so funny?"
"I was just thinking if the sex with you is one-tenth as fun as arguing with you, I'll be one happy bastard."
"You'll never find out. You - "
He kissed me. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched - gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris. ~ Colson Whitehead

Honesty was a thing that could never be a thing. In a blaze of hubris and misplaced enthusiasm, we kowtowed to it, thinking it would make us better people, but conveniently forgetting that an abstraction was incompatible with the specificity of a human's needs and wants. ~ Erin Bomboy

Perhaps it is only the Earth that will speak the leftist language now, battered and infuriated as she is by Modi's developmental agenda. Perhaps she will unleash her fury through the weapons of storms, thunder, lightning, rain, floods and earthquakes. In Modi's enthusiasm for development, the atmosphere is further filled with factory smoke. Tribals who live close to nature have nowhere to go. In the hubris of extreme progress, man, suffering revulsion from excessive consumption, may see the need for change. If not, the Earth will speak. ~ U.R. Ananthamurthy

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? ~ Leif Enger

What is technology in the end but man's futile effort to create the world in his own image? ~ Marty Rubin

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. ~ Larry Wall

The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power. ~ C.G. Jung

And I get angry. Because we've tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man one accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka's mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign -- a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways -- was not launched. I am angry I didn't realize -- or accept on a cellular level -- how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn't take that seriously enough. ~ Patrisse Khan-Cullors

It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is. ~ Lisa Randall